Working Group Papers

NSW Air Quality Working Group

The Australian Tunnelling Society recognises the importance of health and safety in our industry in addition to valuing the strong experience and contribution of our members to support key stakeholders in our ever-growing sector. Collaboration with industry stakeholders is essential to both raise awareness of the important issue of silica dust control, but also to enable effective strategies to be developed that are practical and a positive step forward.

The Air Quality Working Group (AQWG) was formed in 2017 as a collaborative platform to enable industry to work together to develop and implement health strategies in conjunction with regulatory efforts to improve occupational health outcomes, with an initial focus on respirable crystalline silica (“silica dust”). Over the past 12-months, the AQWG membership have worked to collectively produce reference material that currently does not exist in the tunnel construction industry’s body of knowledge. This information is considered to benefit the wider tunnelling industry and therefore is now made freely available on the ATS website.